From Barcelona to Geneva.

Geneva, Switzerland

Brendan and I just rolled into Geneva a few hours ago after our 13 hour train ride from Barcelona. On Tuesday, we spent most of the day walking from Patricia's place down to the Sagrada Familia, a Roman Catholic basilica that was designed by Antoni Gaudi.

Entrance of the Sagrada Familia

Brendan found it a lot more interesting then I did. The entire inside of the basilica is just construction scaffolding since they are still building it. The basilica itself is surrounded by construction equipment further dampening the experience. It takes like 5 minutes to walk through it from the front entrance to the rear. Luckily, the saving grace of the tour was the ability to walk up several hundred stairs inside some of the towers to an observation deck. This was the closest that I have come to feeling like an animal in a heard. There's literally just one long line of people going up the stairs in one of the towers, then coming back down via a second tower. (Thankfully you don't have traffic going both ways on the same staircase since the stairs are way too narrow.) Anyways, I didn't get as much out of the experience as Brendan did, but I'm sure if you're a Gaudi follower our something you'd appreciate it more.

From the basilica, we headed back to Place Catalunya to run some errands before meeting back up with Patricia at a local cafe on the square where I had some of the most amazing hot chocolate effort. (No surprise since the cafe was called Cafe Zurich). Afterwards, we returned home to get ready for going out that night.

I guess things start late in Barcelona because we didn't leave Patricia's house until 11.30pm to meet up with her friends. We headed to some local bar/pub and had drinks until just after 3.00am. (This was the sight of my second Foreign Language Lesson.) The bar closed around 3.15am, so we headed over to some popular disco club that was quickly filling up. We thought we had passes to get in for free but apparently they weren't valid that night because it was a holiday, instead the cost was 10 Euros to enter. We debated for a few minutes over this then finally decided to pay the cover, only to find out that it had somehow risen to 15 Euros. Well, that didn't go over very well with the girls who let the bouncer know, so they stormed out.

We decided to hit up another club but they had a huge cover as well. By now it was around 4.30am, so we just hit a local cafe/restaurant for some food before taking the bus back home, getting to bed around 6.30am, pretty late given that we really didn't party all that hard, but a fun night none the less.

On Wednesday morning, we obviously slept in a little bit before heading out to check out Tibidabo, the highest point in Barcelona which has a huge church and amusement park at the summit. It was a really nice park area, with a bunch of people hiking and mountain biking. It sort of reminded me a little bit of Twin Peaks in San Francisco, but much larger. Unfortunately we didn't quite make it all the way to the top because we had a lunch appointment with Patricia's parents around 2pm.

View of Barcelona from 2/3 of the way up Tibidabo

After a great lunch hosted by her father, we all headed back to her place to back up and say our goodbye's before heading to the train station to catch out first of 3 trains bound for Geneva at 7.20pm. First train was a regional/commuter line that took us about 1.5 hours outside the city, heading north to a town called Cerbere on the French border. Since we had over an hour before out next train, Brendan and I decided to walk into town. The town was absolutely deserted, very dark and just had a really eerie feeling to it. It didn't help that it was kind of raining with a bunch of fog in the air. (The town had a Mediterranean feel to it, with a neat little cove and rocky shoreline. I bet on a sunny day the town is quite neat, but last night it was really dodgy).

Anyways, after wandering around for about 20 minutes, I think we found the only open bar, or open anything for that matter and decided to have a drink with some locals who were watching the France/Cypress world cup soccer match. We strolled back to the station via some sketchy road that was doubling as a flood control river (must have had a lot of rain recently since the sewers were backed up), then through some graffiti riddled tunnel (we left our mark) to get back to the train bound for Narbonne France.

Drinks in Cerbere while waiting for our next train.

The final train, from Narbonne to Geneva was around 7 hours long but quite nice and we both got plenty of sleep before pulling into the Geneva station around 8.30am this morning.

Now, we're running around doing a few errands while I wait for my laundry. This afternoon, we're going to meet up with another friend of Brendans, then drive up to Gstaad for a few days of hiking and camping.

Not sure if I'll have internet access up in Gstaad, so it might be a few days before the next update.

Kenny